Black Skin, White Masks

Abstract

This chapter argues that Frantz Fanon’s first book Black Skin, White Masks is unified by a profoundly existentialist conception of human being and psychological functioning. It argues against the prevailing reading of the book as a conceptually and methodologically eclectic analysis of various problems of colonialism that offers no prospect of a solution. Rather, the underlying argument of the book is that people become racialized through the collective sedimentation of a colonial value system. The shared culture is suffused with the classification of people into superior and inferior groups and the internalization of this classification causes both social discrimination and psychic distress. This is an existentialist theory because it denies that there is any human nature, any inbuilt traits of groups of people, or any innate traits of individuals. Racialization can be overcome by changing the shared culture that encodes and transmits it.